


Fourteen million optimisations

by melmonella



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-13 01:46:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19241338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melmonella/pseuds/melmonella
Summary: A story about how The Endgame would have unfolded if doctor Strange used the fourteen million futures he has seen to actively optimize the outcome of the events, as opposed to doing pretty much nothing proactive.





	Fourteen million optimisations

**Author's Note:**

> All credits go to Marvel Worldwide Inc. Please don't sue me.

_ "I've looked ahead, saw alternate futures to determine the outcome of the coming conflict." _

_ "How many did you see?" _

_ "Fourteen million six hundred and five" _

_ "How many did we win?" _

_ "One." _

* * *

"Tony, I need to speak with you." said doctor Strange

Everyone was still shocked silent from his previous declaration. Thanos was coming, and there was, practically speaking, no way for them to win.

"About what?", said Tony

"I have a plan. Let's walk."

They went away from the rest of the group, moving behind a pile of spaceship debris where Strange opened up a spark ring, moving them still further.

Closing the ring behind him, Strange turned to Tony.

"I lied.", he said

"Do we have no chance at all then? We win in zero futures?", Tony said, sitting down on top of a cylindrical tank.

"It is actually around twelve.” said Strange, scrubbing his beard. “But the next fight will go more smoothly if the others believe we have almost no chance at all."

Tony looked at him strangely. "Is that so? How much time do we have before he comes, actually? Should we be talking about this instead of preparing for the fight with the others?"

"He will come in an hour and a half, and that was just what we need to discuss. If we want to win completely, we must lose here." Strange came closer, and sat on the same tank. "Thanos must get the time stone from me."

Tony rubbed his eyes, grimacing. "Explain the logic to me here, please? If we want to defeat a spacefaring tyrant with supermagic, we need to make him  _ more _ powerful?"

Strange nodded. "The truth is, we can't defeat him here. At best we can severely injure him, but with the space stone, he would always be able to escape and recuperate. He isn't pressed by time, we are. He can attack us anywhere, at any time, in ways which we can not defend against. Making him retreat for a time will only make him start picking us off one by one, and will lead to the same conclusion."

Tony frowned, considering. "So we can't just pull the glove off his arm? He has some contingency in place?"

Strange nodded. "I suggested different plans to us in the futures I went through, and saw how they worked out. We have tried to take the glove off, in one shape or another, in over three million of them. The glove is not just clothing - it is a very specialised device, on the border between magic and technology. It interfaces with his arm completely, practically becoming part of his body. There are... spikes of liquid metal growing from the inside of the glove into his body, intertwining with his nerves and bones. It would be impossible to take the glove off without cutting off his arm."

"And we can't do that either?"

"We do not have any weapon that can cut through his bones. We have tried many times, and had this conversation many times before too. I have tried telling you the ideas you have came up with in the alternative futures, and then let you think about the problem using that knowledge, iterating on it for hundreds of times. You have, in effect, tried for years to solve this problem. You did not come up with anything that worked."

Tony scratched his beard. "How about those portals of yours? They cut off the arm of the monster in New York well enough."

Strange was shaking his head before Tony even finished talking. "Thanos has been preparing for this for a very long time. He has strengthened his body with technology, as well as hiring mages to put a myriad of protective spells on him. Trying to close a spark ring on his arm just breaks the spell without harming him, and kills me with the backlash. I could not figure out a way to dispel those protective charms before he kills us either."

"Well, fuck. So how do we win then?"

"First, Thanos must decisively win. Otherwise, if he is only defeated partly, he will persist in being a significant threat. After he annihilates half of all life, he will destroy the infinity stones in order to prevent anyone else from using them."

"You are suggesting we sacrifice  _ half of the entire universe _ as a trap to kill him? What is even the point afterwards?"

"Only temporarily. You may have heard of Ant man. I do not understand the science, but he is currently within the quantum realm, which will somehow protect him from the effects of the actions of Thanos. After you rescue him from there, he will share the relevant technology with you. You will use it to develop time travel."

"Time travel through the quantum realm?" Tony jumped up from the tank, waving his arms in exasperation. "Are you insane? Just the -"

"I have seen it happen tens of thousands of times, Tony. It is not any more dangerous than any of the other stunts you pull on a regular basis. I can't help you with the designs - I don't understand enough of the science to copy them - but you reliably figure it out"

Tony sat back down, seeming exhausted. "If I am so key to the plan, how will you ensure I do not accidentally die? Fifty fifty chances do not seem that good.""

"I can put a spell on his glove, spoof the chances on who it picks when the time comes. It is extremely difficult to make it work without alerting the safeguards on the glove, but with enough tries I have grasped the trick to it. All we must do here is stall him for five minutes while I work, and make him believe he has won through adversity on our part. That way, he won’t check his glove."

Tony glanced at Strange strangely. "And he will buy it?"

"Thanos is, frankly, not that smart."

"If you used the futures to train, why not train some more? Why stop at just fourteen million?"

"The stone uses more and more power with each use, in a short amount of time. It is already noticeably drained, to the point where I would have to use it in battle to cover this fact up. I could wring out at most a hundred thousand more visions out of it, but at this point futures become less and less reliable because I have to change my actions to cover up more and more drain on the stone. I, myself, will also become more and more exhausted and prone to error. There is just no point to it."

Tony nodded. "Alright, that makes some sort of sense, as far as magic generally does.. And then what, we find baby Thanos and strangle him?"

Strange shook his head. "While that would work, no, there is a better option. You will collect the infinity stones in the past, make your own infinity gauntlet, and then rewrite the universe to better suit humankind as a whole. There are many potential faults on the path there, however. You will need to take notes, this will get detailed."

* * *

Tony held the ash that was left after Peter has disintegrated in his arms. Strange said it would happen, he knew it would happen, but it still shocked him.

He knew that even if he hadn't come here, if he has stayed on Earth, this would still have happened. But it still felt like he failed.

They fought Thanos valiantly, even though both Tony and Strange knew it was pointless, all so that Thanos would believe that he was now completely invincible. According to Strange, this would make him more likely to destroy the stones immediately after he has achieved his victory. He knew the logic of it, but it still felt like a failure to avoid using the strongest weapons at his disposal against the purple menace.

He squeezed the dust tight in his fist. Failures were meant to be corrected. Strange has sacrificed himself, and so far everything was going according to his plan. Tony would see that the rest of it would follow suit.

Thanos thought he has won. Tony would make sure he would be mistaken, now and in all the pasts..

"So, what happens now?" Nebula said, coming up to him. "Was this part of his plan too?"

Strange said that while Tony was key to the whole plan, all other humans here weren't. That meant they had to die for Tony to have enough oxygen to survive until they were found, as oxygen generation on the ship was irrepairably broken. Nebula did not breathe, and would be helpful with the repairs to the engines of the ship, and so she lived.

"Yes." Tony stood up, and headed towards the least damaged ship around. "Now we repair this ship, set up an automatic radio transmission on a certain frequency, and head into space. If Strange is right, it will be exactly nine days and three hours before Captain Marvel finds our signal."

"Who is Captain Marvel?"

Tony turned back, with a blank expression on his face. "I have no idea." he said.

* * *

_ "As soon as you return to Earth, you must take power and establish control over the people left alive." Strange said. "It will take a lot of resources to construct everything you will need for the operation, and that requires a civilisation. Half of all experts in all fields have died. Half of the governments are left without the heads of state. World will already be in chaos by the time you return, and it will only get worse as time goes on. You can not allow this. A fair amount of resources can be replaced by raiding the warehouses which are left without owners, but some of the core components will require a functional supply chain. They will require engineers that are willing and able to work, power to run the manufacturing plants, raw materials and computational power. All that you must preserve." _

_ "Makes sense." Tony nodded. "How do you propose I do this?" _

_ "People need hope." Strange said. "For revenge, for a better future. By the time you return you can tell them your plan for finding Thanos - he would not care about his own life enough to stop you. But do not mention time travel, do not even hint at it. You do not want Thanos to realise he must rewrite the time itself. He could remotely view Earth with the stones, and he still has spies on the ground – the idea would inevitably reach him." _

_ "This is pretty general advice," Tony noted. "You have been much more specific with the rest of the plan." _

_ Strange shook his head. _

_ "Human behavior depends on too many things for me to give you specific advice. In the futures I have seen, most problems only came up once. I gave you the notes on the ones that come up repeatedly, and as for the rest, I can only rely on your personal judgement." _

* * *

Seventeen days after the apocalypse, Thanos has destroyed the stones, releasing an energy wave that has been felt all across the universe.

What was left of the Avengers flew out in order to capture him. Tony did not go with them. He had a government to reconstruct.

In the week he had been on Earth he had not managed to get anything even close to a proper state running, of course. But the core structure of it was beginning to take shape. Now his main task was acquiring resources necessary to run that structure, be it human or material.

The first problem was that of human resources. Machine of government was made out of people that were proficient at being a cog in their particular part of the apparatus, and without those people, state would grind to a halt and die. Tony could not produce new experts – he had neither the time nor ability to train them – but he didn't need to. People were already there, and all they needed a new organization system to slot into.

When people did not know what the future would hold, their first instinct was to do what they could to make themselves and their families safe. That, ironically enough, made the situation worse. Instead of stopping the chaos, most police officers rushed to find their loved ones and bring them to a place that was safe. Paramedics were not helping the wounded, but stocking their own houses on food. Firefighters did not fight fires, repairmen did not repair, and delivery men did not deliver the goods. There were some saints that gritted their teeth and did their duty, but they could not hold up the entire society on their shoulders. 

All Tony had to do was gather everyone with a key skill around himself, and give them a new reason to work. Coming up with a reason was simple – exactly as before the apocalypse, he only had to find something people wanted, and then provide it in return for labor. 

Food was, ironically, one of the most pressing issues for most citizens. One would think that with the frugality of the modern world, after half of the population has disappeared, there would be more than enough food for everyone. But the issue was that food was not stored where it was sold. Before the snap, stores would never seem to run out due to daily deliveries. But after the snap, not only were the streets blocked by cars whose drivers have disappeared, but the people responsible for the deliveries were nowhere to be found. Half of them has disappeared off the face of the earth, some have been injured or committed suicide, and the rest weren't about to come to work. And so stores only could offer what they had on the shelves.

Of course, that ran out almost immediately. After people have realised what has happened, they panicked, and rushed into the stores to stock up on food. Resulting fights over the products have ruined a lot of the produce, and still more has been destroyed in the coming days due to widespread fires. Those that came to the stores late were forced to either rob others, or break into newly vacated flats to loot the contents of their fridges. However, that would only work for so long, as most people before the snap mostly did not store more food than was necessary to last a week.

Fires raging across the city did not help. Some of them were accidental, and would never have became such a huge issue if not for the lack of functional firefighting teams and the utterly blocked roads. Others were set intentionally, by quickly forming gangs of nihilistic looters, who knew there would be no police to stop them. Gangs served to further divide the populace - ones who did not want to join such gangs were forced to organise on a small scale, simply to protect themselves. Any location which could delineate itself from the rest of the city - a neighborhood where everyone knew one another, an apartment block with conveniently defendable entrances - quickly became a small state of its own. 

Of course, that simply made it harder to organise on a larger scale. Competition for resources between such microstates quickly sacked them of any trust in one another. Remainders of the police force, and other similar organisations, attempted to establish cooperation between the states in order to do things that benefited everyone, but they lacked the resources needed to motivate them.

The whole city was in an enormous catch-22. In order to locate, distribute, and manage resources, large amounts of manpower had to be coordinated. However, in order to incentivise people to coordinate on a large scale, you needed large amounts of resources. No one could offer a solution to this, before Tony returned to Earth.

As any other difficult problem, this one could be solved by a sufficiently large robot army. His manor and the Stark Tower had an independent power supply and autonomous manufacturing facilities, and so he immediately set Friday to manufacture a fleet of simple autonomous drones. He also gave a command to take over the drones left after the Ultron fiasco, and move them into the local area. 

With the robot army and a fleet of helicopters belonging to Stark Industries, it was easy to start shipping fuel, food and medical supplies from outside of the city. Friday stealing the inventory logs of several key shipping companies by hacking into their mainframes also significantly sped things up. With the resource flow secured, Stark Tower was slowly becoming a safe haven in the center of New York, and people with nowhere else to turn flocked to it. 

Publishing the video of the fight with Thanos, as recorded by his suit's cameras, also gave him a head start. Now people knew  _ what _ has happened and who was responsible. Tony, knowing what the future would hold, promised them that Thanos would be caught and executed. Most did not believe him, but they would once the deed was done.

Once Tony had secured the neighboring area and accumulated some intelligent manpower, alliances with the neighboring microstates snowballed. They were kept together by fear and uncertainty, so as soon as Tony offered a better alternative they quickly imploded, giving Tony an endless supply of new manpower. Tony set up a basic job market in order to trade with people for food and medicine in return for simple manual labor of the kind that would be difficult to manage by the robots.

Friday was not a true intelligence, and was best used for simple, repetitive labor. It could move cars blocking the streets out of the way, but scavenging supplies from the empty flats around town was a task too diverse for it to handle effectively. Using human labor for it was much more efficient. And while that help was not strictly required, it gave people something productive to do and set the civilisation back on the track of recovery.

He made sure to keep the more dangerous and psychologically taxing work away from the people, however, even if the load on Friday was quite high. Corpses of the dead had to be found and buried, before a plague was added to the list of the problems facing humanity, and robots were immune to both disease and horror of handling hundreds of the dead each day.

There were quite a lot of corpses. Some were from the automobile accidents caused by thousands of cars veering into the opposite lanes once their drivers have disappeared and crashing into cars with perfectly corporeal drivers, crowds of people or the first story of buildings. Some were from the food riots of the following days, or attacks of the gangs roaming the city, and some were from despairing people comiting suicide. 

Luckily enough, there was enough work to go around for everyone. First strategic priority was the establishment of stable electricity supply, which took up almost all available engineers. Without electricity, all the rest of the infrastructure (or whatever remained of it) would collapse quickly. Already a lot of facilities were overloading and failing due to lack of manual regulation and supply. Places which were reliant on coal power, and thus on constantly functioning supply lines, have already failed. New York was not one of them, but it was very reliant on gas power, and so essentially the same problem remained. Tony was already working on a design of a mass-producible fusion reactor based on the simplified version of the ones used in his suits in order to replace these old sources of power.

These and a hundred other tasks fully occupied Tony's attention ever since he came back. He had no time for leisurely excursions to other planets.

* * *

Two days later Captain Marvel and the others returned with captured Thanos. As Strange has predicted, the power surge detected earlier came from the destruction of the Infinity Stones. Tony trusted Strange by now, which was another reason why he did not bother going along. But the others needed closure, and this would serve for it.

He gave them strict orders not to kill Thanos. Ending him on some god-forsaken planet in the depths of the cosmos would not be helpful to anyone. Removing his arms and legs would make him safe to transport, and then he should be brought to Earth. For what he did to humanity, he would be judged by humanity, and it’s representatives. Judged, sentenced, and executed in full view of the whole world.

It was easy to find a capable judge with vengeance on their mind. Tony flew to their house personally, and told them about the planned trial. They agreed to lead it immediately.

Trial took only one day, from the beginning to end, with Tony arranging everything behind the scenes. Witnesses who took part in the defence of Wakanda were called, and their statements added to the record. Remains of the infinity gauntlet were presented as evidence. Everything has been done in accordance with law, so that there would be no doubt: you may be a god, but humanity  _ will _ judge you for it.

Jury has found Thanos guilty of genocide unanimously, and Thor cut off his head.

Tony made sure that trial would be transmitted on all media sources available. Announcements were made days in advance to gather the audience, and Friday sent a fleet of robots to take control, repair, and use the relevant infrastructure. For the first time in weeks, television worked smoothly in the whole state.

With half of their staff dead, all old centralised media organisations were in disarray. Newspapers were not published and television was haphazard at best. Internet became the primary source of the information, even though its functionality was slowly decaying without repair. But it was decentralised, so most of the failures simply lead to slowdowns, and did not interrupt the core functionality. Similarly, radio kept working. Many people knew how to build a transmitter, and a vast majority of people could get ahold of a functional radio station in any car. Tony was slowly making things centralised again.

Trial itself was merely the first piece of major news to go through the system uninterrupted. It was meant to garner enough attention that people would realise television was working again, and would be able to get key pieces of information from it in the coming months. Information like where the people were concentrating, where medical supplies and food could be acquired, and what places were brought back into some semblance of civilisation. Tony’d efforts on that front were not alone, either - cities in the vicinity of military bases were perhaps the fastest to bounce back.

As Tony watched Thanos head roll down onto the floor of the execution chamber, he breathed a sigh of relief. While Thanos still lived, there remained a chance that he could somehow bounce back and reverse the situation, however slim. Now that chance was gone, permanently.

Even though Strange said this would happen, Tony still found it hard to completely trust the predictions. Even if he could somehow bring himself to believe in magic, he could always screw up the progression of the events by accident, perhaps irreversibly. After all, he only had a set of notes left by Strange, and not the man himself.

But now that Thanos was dead, he could get busy in what he knew best: science and engineering. He would lose himself in the project, and there would be no time left to worry.

It was time to bring the Ant Man back out of the quantum realm.

* * *

Black Widow went to retrieve him from the storage facility Strange told Tony about. Three hours later Scott was drinking coffee with his family on top of the Stark Tower, his suit already being analysed in the lab.

Naturally, all it took was an apocalypse for a Stark to get his hands on Hank Pym technology.

Strange told Tony that Thanos still had agents on Earth, who would contact the purple giant under certain circumstances. One of the circumstances was any possibility of someone undoing what Thanos has done. As such, they were investigating various organisations on Earth that might be capable of pulling that off, which meant Shield.

According to Strange, if any of the spies were to find any detailed information about Ant Man, they were almost certain to realise the mechanism of the suit, and the possibilities of time travel. And if Thanos found out about it while his glove was still intact, he would edit the entire timeline of the universe before destroying the stones. That could absolutely not be allowed to happen, and it was a miracle he didn't tend to think of it on his own.

There were too many agents for Strange to spoof the gauntlet into killing them all - he could only control the fate of several dozen key people without making the spell big enough to be detected. He could only take care of the ones closest to the key information, and then iterate through the futures until he found the actions Tony would have to do in order to prevent the rest from realising what was right under their noses until the stones were destroyed. Finding this perfect sequence of actions, and which people had to die and which had to live to fulfill it, took most of the futures Strange has foreseen.

Even allies were not safe from death to make this future come about. Letting Hank Pym live would end in failure, as he would think of the time travel plan on his own before Tony returned, and would tell it to Shield, leading to the agents of Thanos finding out. Letting The Wasp live would end in failure, as she would pull Ant Man out of the quantum realm too soon, and they would likewise be seen in public.

Tony had to lead the world to safety all on his lonesome, sparing no one in the process, all so he could reverse the evils later.

He could not tell anyone else about the secret war he has been fighting, because his communications were not perfectly safe. He could not even mention Ant Man, lest he bring more attention to the man. He could not attack the agents directly, because there was no way to take all of them out without the others realising someone knew of their organisation, unpredictably changing their habits and safehouses, and then investigating what Shield was trying to hide from them with the sudden attack.

All he could do is follow the actions outlined by Strange. A plausibly sabotaged helicopter was sent to retrieve files from the Shield headquarters, resulting it it’s crash and destruction of old research notes of Hank Pym. A test of the water main went "wrong", increasing the pressure in the pipes beyond the limit and flooding a certain server room. A hundred other things which only achieved their purpose five steps down the line, in ways which should hopefully be impossible to track down to Tony's intentions.

But now Thanos was dead, and there was no reason to hide anymore. Plan could proceed into the next big stage.

* * *

For a long time, development of Tony’s suit strength and durability has stagnated. He has tinkered with the versatility of their usage, made the individual parts independently pilotable and capable of assembling in mid air, and even converted the whole architecture to utilise nanotechnology, making the suit capable of actively reshaping itself in battle. But as far as the power output of the suit, or it’s ability to take damage, there have been very few changes since the first version.

Fundamentally, there was a limit to how much force a piece of metal could take before it broke. Using better materials and a smarter structural design would help, but you would hit the cap sooner or later. If you wanted to go  _ above  _ that, you simply had to use more metal - thicker armor and thicker structural skeleton. That, however, also increased the mass. In order to keep the speed of the suit at a level that would be usable in a fight, you thus needed to use more energy every second, which sharply decreased the operating time. That was the main reason why Victoria extension to his suit was only used rarely, typically only for a short length of time, and didn't fly.

Increasing the size of the arc reactor in order to get more energy did not significantly help - until reactor got to the size of a car, increase in energy capacity was only marginal compared to increase in weight and volume. Adding more reactors helped, but each of them was very vulnerable to damage and thus presented a potential liability in a fight. Nonetheless, Victoria had three secondary reactors to help with the energy drain. Without them it was simply unusable.

Tony had thought long and hard about ways to deal with this problem, but no great solutions were forthcoming. Until now.

Hank Pym's size changing technology could freely change the size and mass of the affected objects. A human could be made as small as an ant, or a building as light as a briefcase. Alternatively, mass could be preserved while the size was decreased, concentrating punches of Ant Man enough he could throw people across the room by jumping at their chest. Furthermore, not only would the mass be preserved, but the durability of the materials would be increased greatly - Ant Man did not break his legs while attacking, even though all eighty kilograms of his weight were supported by his needle-sized legs.

Incorporating this technology into the Iron Man suit meant he could easily fit a dozen arc reactors into the space of one, increasing the energy output by an order of magnitude while keeping the mass minimised. Plates of armor could be initially manufactured to be the size of a car, and then minimised to the size of a shoulder pad while increasing their durability and decreasing their weight. Ammunition would take up no space at all, and could then be expanded to the size of tank rounds after it is fired. Stealth benefits of being capable of shrinking to the size of the fly were also obvious.

The maximum safe minimisation factor allowed for by Ant Man technology was around two thousand in all directions. This meant that every cubic centimeter of cargo space was, effectively, a warehouse six storeys tall and twenty meters to the side. In total, the suit had enough cargo space to rival the largest warehouses in the world. The biggest problem was designing the retrieval system to autonomously manage all the items that would be stored there.

Given the amount of materials each suit could carry, engineers went ahead and stored a small army of drones inside each of them, as well as complete water and air purification facilities, hydroponics farms sufficient to feed a dozen people on a varied diet, and a small machine shop. A supercomputer cluster hosting Friday ran all systems inside the suit, and four arc reactors, each of which was capable of powering a small city, supplied the power.

They would have put more in, if they had the time.

While the suit wasn't quite self-sufficient and would run out of several key resources eventually, it was fully capable of independent survival anywhere in the world, including deep space, for about a decade. With access to external materials, it was capable of staying functional practically indefinitely.

But improvements in battle performance were not the only benefit. If a large metal part was minimised while  _ decreasing _ its durability, it could be machined into shape as easily as a small piece of wood. Reverting the effect would then produce a perfectly machined part of arbitrary size, for a fraction of the effort. Going the other way - increasing the size of microscopic parts until they could be machined, assembled, and then reduced back to the original scale allowed for further possibilities in minimisation of components while reducing the time and effort required for it and increasing the precision.

Overall, capability of his suit has soared in just one short month. It was to his previous suit what that model was to the original one he built in a cave out of metal scraps and car batteries. And that meant he could finally undertake a mission which would be key to the future plans without any major risk to himself.

Going into the past was dangerous and unpredictable. At several key points, they might have to engage in combat, possibly with past versions of themselves. This meant that maximising their combat ability was essential to the success of the plan as a whole.

Tony was intending to manufacture suits identical to his own for all members of the team which would travel into the past. Making the Avengers move faster, capable of flight and carrying enough ammunition to level a small country would ensure no accidents would happen during the trip. Nobody would be shot by accident, captured, or incapacitated at a critical moment leading to an untimely rescue which would endanger the mission as a whole. In fact, if Tony managed to do what he intended to do today, nobody in the past would be capable of so much as scratching any of the Avengers.

He was flying to Wakanda to steal their Vibranium.

He would have simply asked them for it, if there wasn't one small problem: Wakanda was in the middle of the deadliest civil war on the planet right now, and all the ways he tried to establish communication with them have failed.

For all the technological advancement of Wakanda, their social development was sorely lacking. Their society, secure on their stashes of vibranium, had not had to go through the challenges that have improved and strengthened societies in the west. Power was still held in the hands of tribes, with the leader being selected by ritual combat, mostly because there was nothing to force them out of that state.

For example, Western armies have developed the idea of chain of command, which allowed for swift and certain transfer of power in case of injury or death of commanding officers. No matter how many people on how many levels of command were killed, everyone knew who was in charge, and everyone agreed on that fact, with no arguing on the part of the participants as soon as the losses were sorted out. Because of this, army bases were one of the first places to adapt to the apocalypse, and served as centers for the civilisation to start rebuilding itself.

This system arose from constant competition between European states - states that adopted this system were more successful than those that didn't, and the idea spread quickly. But Wakanda was different. With no threat being posed by their neighbors, their society had little reason to change to a more stable form.

This was also the reason why their weaponry, despite being made of a staggering fortune in vibranium, was so primitive by modern standards. A modern fighter jet could get up to twice the speed of sound in a level flight with no significant effort, whereas Wakanda analogues could not cross the sonic barrier at all. Their planes would better be classified as light helicopters, really. Their main weapons were sonic spears, which, while reasonably effective in close quarters city-based scuffles between the Wakanda tribes, were utterly useless against a more conventional army with an engagement range being measured in hundreds of meters. Such concepts as "artillery" did not exist in Wakanda at all.

After their chief died along with half of their entire population, the whole state was thrown into disarray. With a dozen different warlords fighting for power, it would be years before anything resembling a stable state open for negotiations could be established. Unfortunately, the biggest advantage Avengers had  - future knowledge provided by Strange - which would get more and more useless the longer they waited. It would be quite unfortunate if one of the key members of the team up and died from a sudden case of cancer before going into the past. So Tony was going to sneak into their warehouses, steal several train cars worth of Vibranium, and be on his way.

He was flying at the height of ten kilometers at several times the speed of sound, his form shrunk down to one millimeter long. With his body being so small, radar waves would simply pass through him, so there was little chance that anything Wakanda had would be capable of noticing him. If they did, his speed should let him escape without getting into combat. And if he was forced to fight, he should be more than capable of defending himself from anything Wakandians would be able to scramble on short notice.

As with any good plan, the chance of him being killed was practically null.

* * *

Returning to Stark Tower after successfully infiltrating Wakanda with absolutely no incidents, Tony set out to unloading his haul.

He got more than just a small mountain of vibranium from Wakanda, but also the tools needed to shape and manufacture it. A brand new vibranium 3D printer took the proud place in the middle of his personal workshop.

After the month he has spent adding Ant Man technology to his suit, the issues relating to the fabric of society crumbling around him have been, if nowhere near fixed, then at least began improving. Surviving engineers who have previously worked for Stark Technologies and other similar companies have been found and their families were relocated to safety.

While Friday with her army of robots could handle manual labor easily enough, creative work involved in creating a time machine was far beyond her capabilities. Tony could not do it alone, either, even if he had most of the decade to work at it - the project was simply too complicated to do alone. He needed a whole company, which is why he had to keep New York from further devolving into anarchy.

And now it was time to begin the design process. He had enough vibranium for the manufacture and he had a capable industrial base at his disposal, most of which would enthusiastically work at any project relating to getting vengeance on Thanos. Only thing left was to wait for Banner to return from his training, and they could start on developing the theoretical basis for it.

Tony would have started on it sooner, but that was one of the annoying things with the information Strange gave him. It lead to good results, but often times Tony didn't know why it did, because there wasn’t enough time for Strange to explain the  _ reasons _ . In this case, he told Tony that after the Thanos trial, Banner should head to Kamar-Taj and receive mage training. He said that if something went wrong with their current plan, Hulk would be the only one that could manually use the stones without dying before the process finished, and that having Banner train in magic "would help him". He didn't explain why it would, or how could Banner learn something that usually took years to master in just one month, he just said that it would help.

Well, Tony supposed he would find out soon.

* * *

An hour later, precisely on the dot, a sling ring opened right in the middle of Tony's personal workshop, and Hulk stomped through.

Tony panicked and started putting on his nanosuit at the same time as trying to figure out how to get Hulk out of the lab without damaging the instruments. It took him a second to realise Hulk had a beard, glasses, was wearing a robe and was, in fact, smiling.

Hulk waved his hand and said "Hey Tony, how has it been?"

Tony paused, and suspiciously said "You seem calmer than usual."

"Oh, right, the big green" Hulk chuckled. "I'm Banner, not Hulk. As you said, magic really helped. We are...one now. Apparently my Hulk state was based on magic, and studying it helped me stabilise it."

Well, that explained why Strange thought Hulk would be a good secondary user of the stones, at least.

Tony retracted the helmet of his suit, came up to Banner and shook his hand. "Welcome back", he said. "Ready to start working?"

"As ready as we'll ever be. Though I'd like some good coffee first, if you have it. Chinese really don't stock it much."

* * *

Strange could not offer Tony any blueprints for the time machine, but he did save them a couple days of brainstorming by offering the general direction of design. They would build a time machine spaceship.

Rocket was sent to purchase two new, medium sized ships to use as the base. Stark Industries managed to scrounge up enough resources he could use as payment, mostly in purified metals. Two weeks after Tony and Banner started drawing the blueprints, he returned from space with the goods. Engineering team descended on the ship like a cloud of locusts as soon as it has landed.

Time travel consisted of three major steps. First, a dimensional bubble had to be created around the object which was going to travel through time. This separated the object from the rest of the world, and ensured it’s safe travel through time.

Second, this bubble was pushed deep into the quantum realm. This step consumed an enormous amount of Pym particles, of which they currently had only a limited supply.

Third, bubble was pushed out of the quantum realm at a desired point in time. There were limits on how accurate the navigation could be, and the longer the time period to jump through the bigger the error would get.

Time bubble was similar to the one created by spaceships traveling faster than light, and so adapting a spaceship to this purpose would be much easier than creating a brand new system. Using a spaceship would also give them a secure base of operations in the past, and allow them to easily visit different planets which housed the different stones.

Tony had ideas for suits which could be used for the same purpose, but that would be relegated to an emergency measure. Not only would it waste Pym particles to transport everyone in their separate bubble, it would also spread them all across time. Most importantly, time travel was irreversible. Suppose you traveled backwards in time and then put yourself in hibernation until the time you have started from. Then you would not arrive in the world you have left, but in the one that evolved from the past that contained your time-traveled body. The difference between the two would depend on how much you have influenced the past. Therefore, traveling simultaneously into two separate points in time was dangerous, as unpredicted changes from the earlier arrivals would propagate forwards in time.

Still, for an absolute emergency this was an option.

In order to maximise the usefulness of information Strange gave them, they were going to only jump backwards in time, collecting the orbs one by one, until they have assembled the whole set. Changes they made could not propagate backwards in time, so as long as each jump took them further into the past and insured the time machine would not be captured, they should be safe.

Given what they were aiming to do, it was unsurprising that engineers named the nascent ship Ouroboros. 

* * *

"Hey Tony?" said Banner

"Yeah?" said Tony, focused on double checking the numbers on the console. 

"I've looked at the numbers again, and I think we've got a bit of a problem."

"And what's that?"

"Well, see, with how many particles it'd take us to make a jump, we only have enough for three jumps, maybe four at best. We need three if we get the accuracy perfectly. That's cutting it awfully close."

"Oh, don't worry, we will have as many jumps as we want." Tony said absentmindedly

"How, exactly?"

"Well, you remember how fundamentally, we can bring any matter from the future into the past?" Tony said, turning to face Banner. "And if that matter already was in the past, we would get two copies of it, like our originals would be running around making problems for us?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, suppose we knew there were more particles at some particular point in time. Then we could just go there and get them, right?"

"So what, you want to go to Hank Pym in the 1960s?"

"Nah, I just had our entire stockpile of particles orbit the Earth for two days, back when we have just taken Ant Man out of the quantum realm. Now, if we jump into the past in five minute increments, get the stock of particles already there, and then jump back again, we will just keep getting more of them won't we. In total we should have well over 600 jumps, and if we run out, we can just repeat the same trick in the past as long as we don't run out completely."

"Oooh."

* * *

Two months later, there still remained a lot of problems in regards to the specifics of the design, but Tony's team could handle those on their own. He had a more important problem to deal with.

Traveling through time would be useless if they could not control the stones. They needed to build their own Infinity Gauntlet.

There was only one place which had enough expertise to assist them with the manufacture of the gauntlet. Nidavellir, the neutron star forge.

Even if Tony could get enough engineering expertise on his side to craft the device, he had no real idea how the stones worked, or how to interface with their power. Earth has spent decades studying the Tesseract, and still only had an extremely vague idea of how it functioned. He had to get into contact with the place that made the original gauntlet.

And so he said goodbye to Pepper, boarded the second of the newly purchased ships, and had Rocket fly it to Nidavellir.

* * *

Eitri has been extremely helpful in mastering the neutron star forge. Normally, the whole device required hundreds of dwarves to operate, but Tony brought a hundred times that in drones. Eitri’s hands have become useless, but the quality of his instruction remained, and so the station was running smoothly soon enough. Two weeks later, Tony has learned enough to craft the dwarf a new pair of hands, and the real work has begun.

Thanos has made his gauntlet to be, well, a gauntlet, but there was no inherent necessity in that shape. In fact, the smaller the device, the more complicated the manufacture process would be. Normally, this would not be a problem for Nidavellir, if not for Thanos. Eitri was only one expert, and could only truly teach them about the system under his personal control. He knew a fair amount about the other systems, and the logs stored in the station’s computers have helped, but there was simply no replacing hundreds of experts that have perished forever.

As such, Tony and Eitri settled on a room-sized console instead.

It would be installed on Ouroboros, and linked into the ship’s systems, which is why Rocket bought two identical spaceships. Tony and Eitri would work on integrating the gauntlet system into the insides of the ship, while at the same time on Earth engineers would be improving the main systems and outside hull. Since time travel and the gauntlet system would take the longest to design, doing them in parallel would save a lot of time.

And so, three months later, Tony returned to Earth with all the components necessary for assembling the stone control interface. Another five months have passed in interfacing the new components with the time machine ship, modifying the armor of the ship to use vibranium alloys, and endless tests, safety checks and minor redesigns of every single component.

And then, a year after the snap, it was time to go back into the past.

* * *

After Captain Marvel helped secure Thanos, she had asked Tony how soon his new plan would come to fruition. Tony couldn’t predict exactly, and Strange has not told him either, so he guessed and told her that it would be about a year. 

And now, a month before the year ran out, she has returned to Earth to ask him if there was anything she should do before the mission.

"You are not going." Tony responded bluntly.

Captain Marvel paused with a blank look on her face. 

“Great, plenty of other things to do.” she said a second later, shook her head, and quickly flew away. Tony wasn’t sure if he saw a hint of anger in her eyes, but it was honestly hard to tell under all that veneer of stoic indomitability.

He turned around and found Banner staring at him.

“So why did you just turn away the strongest person on earth?” Banner asked.

Tony shrugged. “We don’t need strength. Each of the suits can level a city on its own, if need be, and the ship can do even more than that. But say we are stuck in our ship for weeks, just patiently waiting. You want her there in such a case? None of us know her. How sure are you she won’t fly out and start doing things on her own?”

Banner paused, shook his head, and got back to work.

The greatest threat to them in the mission would not be enemies, but themselves. Since nobody could tell how long the mission would last if something went wrong, the danger of the team breaking due to infighting and psychological pressure could not be underestimated. It was the same as submarine teams and deep arctic research missions, really. As such, Tony picked only three people to go into the past - himself, Captain America, and Banner.

Tony was sure that he could control himself well enough, and he was one of the few people capable of repairing and maintaining all engineering systems on the ship. Banner had been dealing with Hulk for a decade, and had recently started learning magical arts - there probably was nobody on Earth that had better emotional control than him. Furthermore, he had extensive theoretical knowledge, and could serve as their expert in magic if some unknown threat came from that direction.

Taking Captain America was somewhat redundant, but his heightened reflexes made him a better suit pilot than Tony or Banner, and an extra pair of hands wouldn’t hurt. He was also a chipper soldier with strong moral fibre, so Tony found him to be a good choice.

Strange’s only advice in regards to whom Tony should take on the mission was saying that Nebula should be off the list no matter what. Other than that, he left the choice up to Tony. That meant that Tony reliably made the correct choice in the futures Strange has seen, and some time could be saved by not explaining the detailed team composition.

At least, Tony hoped so. It’s not like he could ask the man now.

* * *

Ouroboros jumped through time, and emerged on the other side of the Moon.

Time travel was not precise. A jump a year long would leave them a couple months off target, on average. A jump of a week would make them miss by three or four days. Since they were attempting to hit a very specific moment in time, only several minutes long, the only way to do that was to do several short jumps, one after another, and hope they don't overcorrect in the other direction by too much.

The first stone they were going to get was Reality Stone. The best time to acquire it would be while Jane Foster was in Asgard, sleeping and alone. Ouroboros had to hit that specific day and time precisely on the dot, not earlier or later.

Of course, their plan took the possibility of overcorrection into account. Even if they arrived earlier than expected, as long as they did not interact with anything of import, they could simply wait until the requisite time. This was why Tony flew Ouroboros to the other side of the Moon before jumping backwards in time - if they were going to be waiting for a while, they should do it in the place least likely to be observed by anyone or anything of import.

Time machine was, of course, not a space machine. Time travel anchored to the closest gravity well, which is why it did not leave you gasping in space after time traveling into the past. So if Tony wanted to end up on the other side of the Moon, he first had to fly there.

After arriving in the past, cameras on the outside of the ship took measurements of the positions of the planets in the solar system, the sun and the stars, as well as of the appearance of the sun itself and cosmic microwave background. By comparing this data with the astronomical archive on board, their position in time could easily be determined to within several minutes, without requiring any contact with the Earth.

First jump put them 4 months short of the date, and the second put them 2 weeks before it.

This was within expectations, and Ouroboros had stadions worth of minimised space for relaxation, so they should not be bored in the meantime.

Since the team was holing up on the Moon in interests of stealth, it would have been rather counterproductive to go out of the ship to explore. However, they were on the  _ Moon _ , and Tony knew that it would be difficult to keep themselves away from that. As such, he did what the original Apollo missions did, and accounted for human nature.

During the landing of the Apollo missions, there were a lot of things astronauts had to do in order to control and guide the descent module. NASA had, naturally, put all those things on a timed checklist. Concerned about astronauts being distracted by looking out the window at the Moon itself at a crucial moment, mission control also added scheduled "gawp time" to let astronauts get the curiosity out of their system by staring out of the illuminators.

Tony did much the same thing. He knew where on the moon they would be camping out, so he scheduled for the whole team to spend a week there, exploring. That also served to get them acquainted to their suits, and test their space exploration features.

They could have used Pym particles to skip the period of waiting on the Moon, but jumping forwards in time was much like accelerated waiting. If someone noticed their arrival, it was best to be alert to their possible machinations, instead of staying in time stasis.

In order to stay in touch with the events of the world - to see if by some unimaginable coincidence their arrival actually significantly affected the past - Ouroboros sent out several miniaturised orbital drones. Four established an orbit around the Moon, always keeping at least one drone in view of the ship, and fifth flew towards Earth. Tuning into several radio and television transmissions would let them keep track of the major world events without exposing themselves.

Back in the future, they determined exact date and time of Jane’s visit to Asgard by comparing memories of several key surviving Asgardians, newspaper reports, and classified SHIELD intelligence. Given that information, it was child’s play to account for the speed of interstellar travel and determine the exact moment when they should leave the Moon.

Ouroboros made a space jump into Asgard, and, while keeping itself minimised and using it’s stealth coating to mask itself amid the clouds, flew towards the palace.

Asgard had not been seriously threatened by anything in centuries. In a lot of ways, it was like Wakanda - a highly advanced civilisation which could allow itself to grow complacent - except worse, for while Wakandans were still threatened by hunger, disease and accidents, strengthened Asgardian physiology took care of most of that. After confirming with Asgardians living in norway, Tony believed that nothing in the past should be capable of detecting Ouroboros. In principle, they could have traveled to Asgard long in advance, but it was best to be prudent and only hang around for the shortest amount of time.

One potential problem was Heimdal. His ability to see souls across all dimensions meant that he might be capable of seeing through all their stealth by avoiding it entirely. This was yet another reason why Tony insisted on a small crew - the fewer the souls, the less likely Heimdal would be to notice a group of them moving in a suspicious way throughout the palace.

Gliding into the room, Ouroboros still hasn't detected any alarms. Tony gave the okay for the operation to proceed - either they really avoided detection, or responce from Asgard would be too slow to catch them anyways. Captain America flew out of the airlock in his suit and dashed towards Jane Foster. Extraction of the Reality Stone took only a moment, and he was back on board immediately afterwards. Airlock was still closing by the time Tony turned the ship around and headed out the window.

No alarms were triggered as they got further and further from the palace. Tony breathed a sigh of relief, turned the ship skywards and sped up, preparing for a space jump.

* * *

Ouroboros appeared above the rocky, desolate planet, where the Power Stone was stored.

Power Stone was not very useful on its own. It could serve as a source of a truly ridiculous amount of energy, but the spaceship already had more than enough coming from the dozen arc reactors Tony installed into it. With Power Stone added, their capabilities would increase, but only marginally. It could also be used to locate the other stones by scanning for their signatures, but they already knew where all the stones were, so that ability was superfluous.

It’s true power, however, came when it was used in combination with the other stones. Every individual stone could be used as a source of power - that is what the Tesseract was originally thought to be by humanity. They could supply enough power to keep the lights on in a city the size of New York, but their special abilities consumed power at a comparable rate. When combined with the Power Stone, however, other stones could be used without care for the energy costs.

For example, previously Reality Stone could cloak their full-size ship for several hours before running out of juice. With the power stone, it could provide cloaking to anyone and anything within a hundred kilometers of their location, indefinitely. This ability was essential for the next steps of their plan, and was the reason why Power Stone was second on their list.

Given how lightly it was protected, it would have been first, if not for Heimdal. Strange gave explicit orders for the order of the collection of the stones, and Tony assumed that if they brought Power Stone to Asgard, Heimdal would have noticed it’s enormous energy signature and immediately triggered the alarms, interfering with Reality Stone extraction.

After a short trip by Captain America to the surface with a set of lockpicks and a ten foot steel pole Power Stone was sitting snugly within the console. Two done, four to go.

It was time to return to Earth.

* * *

Ouroboros first jumped backwards in time to before they have initially arrived on Earth, then space-jumped to Earth, and finally jumped backwards in time again. Even if someone noticed the theft of the Reality Stone and attempted to set up a trap for them, their trap would be in vain since the team would arrive months  _ before _ the trap was set up. And even if someone noticed their space jumps and attempted to track them, they would find absolutely nothing as the second time travel jump would cut off any pursuers that could not themselves travel through time.

Of course, the chances of them being caught or interfered with by any trap were practically null, given all their hardware. But prudence was habit.

According to Strange, in order to get the Time Stone, all they had to do was ask the Ancient One for it. Tony found that incredibly strange, as according to what he knew Ancient One was protecting the stone from everyone for her entire life. Her suddenly deciding to give it away to several strangers who showed up out of nowhere bordered plausibility - it seemed much more likely that she would fight them with everything she had. On the other hand, at this point he knew better than to question Strange.

But he also knew not to doubt his suspicions overmuch. While Captain America suited up and flew to talk to the Ancient One on the roof of an inconspicuous building in the middle of the New York, Tony quietly sent out three thousand armed drones into the sky, under the cloak of the Reality Stone. Some of them aimed directly at the Ancient One, while others took aim in a grid around her - ten centimeters to the side of her head, twenty, thirty, and so on. This way, no matter how she dodged, she would be hit by at least one attack, because all the space to dodge  _ into _ would be filled with shots.

Captain barely talked for a minute before Ancient One’s face shined and she handed over the amulet with the stone. Motioning for Steve to wait, she went into the building, and came back a minute later holding a thick leather-bound book. Giving it to the Captain, she waved him off with a similarly sunny look on her face.

Tony met him in the airlock.

“So what was all that about?” he said.

“Apparently, she was planning this play for a while.” Said Captain, smirking and taking off his suit. “Saved the stone for it and everything. Told me to give this book to you - it’s advice on how to not screw up the last wish. Turns out she had been writing it for the past three hundred years. Oh, and she said your drones were cute.”

Tony opened his mouth, thought for a moment, and closed it, not having much else to say. 

* * *

With Time Stone in their hands, time traveling ability of the ship was significantly improved. Not only could they jump much, much further backwards in time with perfect precision, but they could also look ahead of themselves to see where exactly they would be jumping. This made the last steps of their endeavor practically child's play.

Ouroboros jumped backwards in time to the middle of the first battle for New York and flew down to Earth. Hiding the ship on one of the top floors of Stark Tower inside an office drawer, Tony motioned for the other two team members to suit up.

While Loki was being taken into custody, Steve headed for the briefcase containing the sceptre, while Banner headed for the Tesseract. Tony observed their movement from the ship and ensured Reality Stone kept them completely invisible, inaudible, and otherwise imperceptible. 

Plan for stealing both items was identical. When the case that carried the scepter was completely closed and in the hands of the agent meant to carry it, Captain America flew to it’s underside and drilled a needle - thin hole through the aluminium casing, using his suit’s lasers and vacuuming all drilled out material into his cargo space. After entering the case itself, he covered up the entry point with a circular cover made of the same material as the case itself, and manufactured in advance for this operation from that exact type of SHIELD case back in the future.

The theft itself was meant to remain unnoticed until hours later, when the cases would be opened for the first time. And by then, Ouroboros would be long gone. Even if someone suddenly decided to closely inspect the outward appearance of the case, they would find nothing. Reality Stone kept the light, sound and vibration of drilling hidden, and covered up the hole with a perfect illusion. Even if the stone failed, hole was so small and covered up with a cover that fit so perfectly that it would take a microscope to notice the hairline inconsistency around the entry point. Even if scepter extraction took longer than expected, Captain America would have all the time in the world to finish his work, clean up, and leave. He most certainly would not have to hurry or improvise along the way, risking the whole operation.

By the time Steve got fully into the case, agent carrying it only got to the lift.

Once inside, Captain released a set of drones that crawled around the scepter and precisely measured its position relative to the surrounding foam. A second set of drones moved into the positions calculated by Friday on board Cap’s suit, and a single main drone attached itself to the surface of the scepter. Once the math was done, drone on the scepter activated the minimisation field. Synchronously, drones around the scepter released pre-manufactured lead plates and started increasing their size and mass.

Scepter was in Tony's possession for quite a while while he was making Ultron, and so he naturally had precise measurements of its size, mass, moments of inertia and all other basic physical parameters. At the time, there was no particular use for them, but he had Jarvis take them just in case. Using those, it was child's play to create a set of weights that would keep the feel of the case exactly the same while scepter disappeared from the middle of it. Since the agents carrying the case would assume the scepter was still inside, and nobody could feel any differences in weight, they would naturally not open it to check. In another briefcase, Banner was doing much the same thing to the Tesseract.

When Tony first explained what they were going to do, Captain asked him wherever you could even minimise the scepter or the Tesseract in the first place, since they were pretty much magical items of unknown properties. Tony told him that if they couldn’t, they wouldn’t be able to move them through time either, since their time travel relied on size minimisation technology to work, and then Strange wouldn’t have told them to go ahead with the plan in the first place. 

It was nice to know something would work before you even tested it for the first time.

Once the process was complete, Captain grabbed the minimised scepter, collected the drones, and exited the case through the same hole he used to enter, closing the cover behind himself.

By the time the lifts of Stark Tower got to the bottom floor, both the Tesseract and the Scepter were gone from New York, with SHIELD none the wiser.

* * *

Returning to the other side of the Moon, Tony and Banner disassembled the loot, and installed the newly acquired stones into the console.

Space Stone could be used to create portals between any two points in space and teleport objects through them. This not only significantly improved the cost and precision of the FTL jump system of the ship, but also made time travel use much fewer Pym particles by improving the efficiency of the dimensional bubble around the ship. Furthermore, it made tactical teleportation across the battlefield possible. Ship could transport any person in a significant area around itself to any other point in that area. Should one of the time travelers get into a (progressively less and less likely) sticky situation where they were about to be captured, ship would simply teleport them out of danger.

Mind Stone largely dealt with memories and manipulation of the mind. In combination with Reality Stone, it made the stealth cloak of the ship truly flawless. Now, even if someone  _ did _ notice the invisible ship, they would immediately forget its existence. While the stone was inside Loki's scepter, this ability was only usable at touch range - mostly due to constraints on the power required to analyse the human brain, divine what parts of it were responsible for the memory, and compute the changes required in order to make the target forget without turning them into a vegetable. In combination with the Power Stone, however, Ouroboros could edit memories of dozens of people in real time at a distance.

That feature would not see any real use, however. Only the soul stone remained to be collected, and even if they would be noticed afterwards, it would be too late.

* * *

Nebula's maps allowed them to easily find the planet that stored the Soul Stone, but accessing it was another issue. Mountain which held the stone was an arcane sealing device older than humanity itself, and required sacrifice to open. Of course, they were short one sacrificial target.

But there was no reason for them to need it in the first place. It was a triviality of security systems that the best way to break a lock is to bypass it entirely. The stones were created at the beginning of time, but this mountain was not. Some intelligent civilisation must have sealed the stone here, so long ago that even its name was forgotten to time. And thus if they went back to that moment, there would be no need to break the seal at all.

Ouroboros activated the Time Stone and scanned backwards in time, sifting through millennia until they saw the mountain be replaced by two dozen green blob-shaped aliens performing arcane rituals. Soul stone was glowing in the middle of an enormous ritual array, and earth was rumbling as stones slowly rose out of the ground, spinning in circles around the group.

Tony set the destination time to two minutes before that moment. Ouroboros jumped, appearing five billion years in the past. A second jump, in space, moved it to the site of the ritual. Cloak made by the Reality Stone fell in place, with aliens none the wiser. A second later, a portal surrounded the Soul Stone, teleporting it to the ship, while Reality Stone left a perfect illusion in its place. Five seconds after Tony pressed the button to go backwards in time, Soul Stone was in their possession, and there was no longer anyone that could stop them.

Installing the stone into the console, Tony felt relieved. Even though the plan should have been flawless after Strange had watched over fourteen million variations of it, the past year has still been the most tense one of his life, ever since he was captured by those terrorists and locked in a cave. But now it was finally over.

Now they could finally remake the universe in humanity's image. They have won, forever.


End file.
